Author Archives: steve neufeld

School of Foreign Languages, Eastern Mediterranean University, Workshop Festival

Thanks to the School of Foreign Languages, Eastern Mediterranean University, for running a one-day workshop festival to share new ideas and research conducted the SFL instructors.

  • The depth and breadth of content in the workshops demonstrates the level of expertise and commitment of SFL instructors to the profession.  It also highlights the status of SFL-EMU in North Cyprus (and indeed Turkey) and is a tribute to the ongoing support for teacher development and innovation by the SFL-EMU administration.
  • The School of Foreign Languages at EMU  certainly offers a great deal of inspiration to sister institutions in North Cyprus and abroad, in how the investment in teacher development yields such a wealth of experience and expertise.

Here are links to the PREZI content that formed the basis of the two plenaries I was privileged to share with my former colleagues at the School of Foreign Languages, Eastern Mediterranean University.

  1. The Grammar Translation Method is Dead! Long live GOOGLE translate!
  2. Technology, teaching and training: pragmatic issues and concerns

For those of you who wonder ‘why’ not ‘how’ to use technology in teaching, have a look at a short history of educational technology.

Cankaya University – 2nd ELT symposium

The symposium entitled “How to Cope with Digital Bees: E-learning Practices in Secondary Education” brought together teachers, directors, and professionals to exchange and discuss ideas and experiences regarding e-learning in English Language Teaching. Teachers and directors from secondary schools shared their relevant applications, observations, reflections and practices. See http://digiprep11.cankaya.edu.tr/index.html for the conference web site.

The symposium’s theme covered the following topics:

  • Web-based learning & teaching
  • On-line education
  • Blended learning
  • Web 2.0 Tools
  • Multimedia Tools
  • Moodle

I was invited to give a plenary session on pragmatic issues and concerns in using Web2.0 tools in teaching.  Here is a slidecast of my plenary session.  Any comments or observations about your own teaching practices in this context would be welcome.

TRANSCRIPT

For those of you who don’t have time to watch and listen to the slidecast, here is a transcript.  Inshallah, the numbered paragraphs correspond to the slide number in the presentation. 🙂 Continue reading

Keyness, multi-concs, and concordances

DISCUSSION POINTS from http://cte319.pbworks.com/activity+-+intro+to+vocabulary+profiling

  • How useful is it to learn what the computer things are ‘key words’ in a text?  Is the computer better at picking out key words than you?
  • Is the use of a concordance useful in seeing words in context in a text?  How does this give you a different perspective on the words that you can’t get from just reading the text?  Give an example for the text you used.
  • To what extent can a tool like Multi-conc help students discover the lexico-grammar of a word?   Would students need special training to use this tool effectively?  Give the link to a multi-conc you created for the text you used.

Vocabulary profiling as a teaching tool

DISCUSSION POINTS from http://cte319.pbworks.com/activity+-+intro+to+vocabulary+profiling

  • How could you use a vocabulary profiler as a teacher?
  • Is it possible to get students as learners to use a vocabulary profiler?  What tasks would you give to them?
  • To what extent is a word cloud generated from http://wordle.net the same as a vocabulary profile from http://lextutor.ca?  What are the key differences.  When would you use a word cloud, and when would you use a vocabulary profile?